Video servers, including networked video servers, transmit "bit streams" to a video client. Such bit streams, which are sometimes referred to as "streams," generally represent video and/or audio signals which represent titles in a library of multimedia sources. Examples of titles of such a library typically include recordings of motion pictures. In general, a video server receives from a video client a request for a particular title and transmits a stream of the particular title to the video client. An example of a video client is a set top box which is generally known and which decodes the stream received from the video server and transmits the decoded signal to a connected television. The requesting of a particular title, receiving the stream of the particular title, and decoding the stream for display on a television are collectively and generally referred to as video on demand.
Examples of such video on demand servers are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,862,450 by Kallol Mandal and Steven Kleiman and entitled "Method and Apparatus for Delivering Simultaneous Constant Bit Rate Compressed Video Streams at Arbitrary Bit Rates with Constrained Drift and Jitter" (hereinafter the '450 Patent) and in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/572,648, filed Dec. 14, 1995 by Kallol Mandal and Steven Kleiman and entitled "Method and Apparatus for Distributing Network Bandwidth on a Video Server for Transmission of Bit Streams Across Multiple Network Interfaces Connected to a Single Internet Protocol (IP) Network" (hereinafter the '648 Application). Both the '639 Patent and the '648 Application are incorporated herein in their entirety by reference.
The popularity of the Internet global network is growing extremely rapidly, and perhaps the most popular protocol of the Internet is the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) of the World Wide Web. According to the HTTP protocol of the World Wide Web, documents, which are generally referred to as "pages," incorporate text, graphical images, sound, and motion video which, when viewed, form a multimedia presentation to user. Such pages are typically viewed using a World Wide Web browser, which is a computer process capable of retrieving HTTP pages and presenting the contents of such pages to a user of a computer system through output devices such as a computer video display device and a computer audio circuit coupled to one or more audio speakers. An example of a World Wide Web browser is the Netscape browser available from Netscape Communications Corporation of Mountain View, Calif.
To display motion video, conventional browsers typically (i) transfer to the computer system in which the browser executes an entire data file which includes data representing a title and (ii) subsequently initiate execution of a player computer process which displays the title to the user on a computer display device. The player computer process is separate from the browser and therefore displays the motion video of the title outside of the page displayed by the browser. In addition, transferring the entire data file prior to displaying the motion video of the title delays substantially the display of the motion video since such data files are typically quite large, e.g., typically 1.8 gigabytes of data to represent a two-hour, VHS-quality motion picture.
Currently, no browser is capable of seamlessly integrating motion video streams into a page of the World Wide Web.